a full. Perhaps art obeys an unwritten law of inert matter that does not apply to the living world: we accept that life has gone from a human face through the ritual of closing the eyelids, but manage to ani-mate a porcelain face with the same

the Departmental Ceramics Museum in Lezoux: a sculpture that speaks equally to the sighted public and the visually impaired, playing on all senses other than sight… The Secret du monde (Secret of the World), since that is the title of the

is, in effect, a vision of a head, an arche-type). You can go around it (its resin sur-face is designed to imitate, to touch, the grain of the ceramic), you can enter it as if going into a chamber of mysteries to experience the forbidden, or approach it: to feel what the inside of a head is like, to know what it would be like to live in a head and perceive what we can usu-ally only imagine or fathom. Perceptions are tactile, as well as auditory, olfactory (Nathalie Talec tries her hand at exhibiting scents, attempted by very few pioneering artists today – Kate Mac Lean and Sissel Tolaas – while industry already deviously exploits such resources: the scent of bread and fresh croissants emanating from industrial bakeries is a powerful lure, and manufactured) and proprioceptive (proprioception means our body’s ability to be in space by means of a large body of information transmitted by ‘sensors’ that have not (yet) accessed the dignity of the five differentiated senses, for us

To move between the sensitive and intelligible, the objective and subjective, and to frequent the unknowable – to ‘see with your eyes closed’.

gesture. With no mouldings or piedouche (the formal name of the small pedestal or base, for a bust) it is like a pool of por-celain in which the image of the young girl seems to dissolve. The artist very logically intersected this ensemble with the phantasmagoria of the inhabita-ble head, to fulfil the commission from

work by Lezoux, is an enlargement to an architectural scale of Celui qui voit les yeux fermés/The One Who Sees Blindly (Nathalie Talec ended up by making a sort of pared down portrait, contrary to, or perhaps because, of the smooth, neutral and slightly conventional nature of the original sculpture: it is easily relatable, it